Biography of E. Thomas Sullivan, J.D.

Tom Sullivan became the 26th President of the University of Vermont in July 2012. Prior to becoming President, he served as Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at the University of Minnesota from July 2004 and through January 2012.

He served as the eighth dean of the University of Minnesota Law School from 1995 to 2002. Upon finishing his term as dean, he returned to full-time research and teaching. In June 2003, he received the J. William Elwin, Jr., Award from the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education for leadership and contributions to law school development. At the University of Minnesota Law School, he has received the Stanley V. Kinyon Teacher of the Year Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has chaired the ABA Section of Legal Education, and has chaired the Association of American Law Schools Section on Antitrust and Economic Regulation. On several occasions, he has been a consultant to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on judicial nominations to the Supreme Court, and to the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee on mergers.

He is a nationally recognized authority on antitrust law and complex litigation, having authored eleven books and over 50 articles. He and co-author Professor Richard Frase published Proportionality Principles in American Law: Controlling Excessive Government Actions (Oxford University Press, 2009). He is the co-author, with Professors Herbert Hovencamp, Howard Shelanksi, and Christopher Leslie of Antitrust Law, Policy, and Procedure (7th ed., 2014) and co-author with Professor Jeffrey Harrison of Understanding Antitrust and Its Economic Implications (6th ed. , 2014). Most recently, he published Complex Litigation with Professors Richard Freer, Doug Floyd and Brad Clary (2nd ed., 2014). He also published Private Antitrust Actions (Little, Brown & Co., 1996) with Douglas Floyd. In 2013, he published The Arc of Due Process in American Constitutional Law by Oxford University Press with Tony Massaro.

On two occasions he has been a visiting faculty member at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. He twice has been a visiting scholar at Cambridge University in England. During the fall semester 2002, he was a visiting professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley (Boalt Hall) and in 2012 he was a visiting faculty member at New York University. Before coming to the University of Minnesota, Sullivan served for six years as dean of the University of Arizona College of Law and as associate dean at Washington University in St. Louis. He began his career in higher education as a faculty member at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He graduated magna cum laude from law school at Indiana University in 1973, where he served as an editor on the Indiana Law Review. After law school, he clerked for a federal judge, in Miami Florida, and thereafter was a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice in the Attorney General’s Honors Program. Before entering Law School teaching in 1979, he was an antitrust litigator with the New York and Washington, D.C., firm of Donovan, Newton, Leisure and Irvine. Throughout his career he has continued to serve as a consultant on antitrust, complex litigation, and Federal Court matters.